Stereo Typing

Stereo Typing is the sum of the parts of a journey. Giovanni Civitenga, aka My Dry Wet Mess, composed his forthcoming album for Brainfeeder over a 15 month period (November ‘10 through January ‘12), between Barcelona and Berlin, in four different houses. And out of the many changes and different chapters, comes a densely layered body of work that - despite being a product of transition - stands as his most grounded and resolved work yet.

The title derived, My Dry Wet Mess explains, “from the concept of typing for the stereo field, as in writing narration through sounds. Writing a story as a writer would do, but using sounds instead of words.” The 14 album tracks use live instrumentation, tweaked samples, slap-bass riffs, slanted beats and winding melodies to form playful narratives and plot shifts, leading the listener to places completely unexpected, and unknown. Twists and turns abound, each track is a journey in itself, at times traversing through intertwining synth lines in a buoyant underwater bassbin, other points diverting into R&B-sampled scifi wonderlands, filled with otherworldly sounds conversing. The album ends on sensory bliss, with the sublime "Prismas" and the daydream-inducing "Youth Reboot".

Though his living situation changed throughout the album’s formation, there’s a inherent sense of family and home in the LP. His father plays guitar, Gianluca Pellegrino (an old friend and regular collaborator) plays various electric guitar parts, and his good friend in New York, Maryam Modarressi, sings on two songs, and her sampled voice makes an appearance throughout the album. The artwork was also created by his close conspirator, Berlin based illustrator Elliot Beaumont, a homage to one of MDWM’s favorite painters, De Chirico. “It's got this hard to define quality to it, a sense of "future nostalgia" that I love and that I find extremely appropriate for my music and the ideas behind it.”